Emergent literature has accorded agency to IOs, but has generally not grappled with the complex decision-making structure and parallel centres of agency that arguably exist within organizations such as the UN. In the area of peacebuilding, the UN could be argued to have several centres of agency, including the Security Council, the General Assembly and its Committee of 34 (C-34) on peacekeeping matters, the Secretary-General, the Departments of Peacekeeping and Political Affairs, the UN Peacebuilding Commission and its subsidiary the Peacebuilding Support Office and lastly the Special Representatives and Envoys of the Secretary-General (SRSGs) in the field who head up the actual peacekeeping peacebuilding missions. The paper will use the sociology of professions to theorize how knowledge and norms are produced and reproduced through practices, and particularly focus on the role of the Special Representatives, arguing that these persons can be seen as norm entrepreneurs in the system (Finnemore and Sikkink, 1998). The decisions and practices in the field are fed back into the system through best practices communities, lessons from the field through the system for organizational learning that has gradually been established over the last twenty years in this area (Benner and Rotmann, 2008). The paper will thus argue that practices from the field, crystallised through the actions of Special Representatives, form a bottom-up source of influence on normative change processes in the UN, in contestation with Member States and other actors. The SRSGs can have this influence on normative change processes due to their relative independence and physical distance from the UN headquarters. With a background often derived from a diplomatic career and/or relative autonomy and interpretation of what the UN is and what it stands for, the paper will argue that SRSGs wield influence due to the decentralised authority and their personal prestige in the UN.
